To Preserve Afrikaners' Language, Mixed-Race South Africans Join Fray

Peter Marais worries as much about the future of Afrikaans in the new South Africa as the next guy. But the next guy is likely an Afrikaner, a member of the white tribe that ruled South Africa until last year and forced its language on a dark-skinned majority. Mr. Marais is part of that abused majority, a man of mixed race.

"I'm a great advocate for the protection and guarding of Afrikaans as an official language," said Mr. Marais, the minister of local government for the Western Cape province in southwestern South Africa. "The colored people don't consider Afrikaans to belong to the white man. We believe it's our language, which the white man stole from us."

Under apartheid, Afrikaans, a derivative of the Dutch brought here by the first white settlers, enjoyed a privileged position in government and education, and was seen as the language of power and control. To the country's 30 million black Africans, and to much of the world, Afrikaans came to represent the brutal apartheid system with its twin pillars of racial separation and white dominance.

In the new South Africa apartheid is dead, Nelson Mandela is President and Afrikaans is just one of 11 official languages. Nine million people speak Zulu as their first language, and 7.4 million speak Xhosa. Afrikaans, with 6 million speakers, runs third, and in white business and academic enclaves it is rapidly losing ground to English, which is the first language of only 3.4 million South Africans but is widely understood across ethnic lines.

Many white Afrikaners still cling tightly to the view that the language was created by and for them. But the changes that made Afrikaans distinct from Dutch -- much as Haitian Creole is distinct from French -- emerged mainly from the interaction of white settlers with nonwhite slaves.

The language's eclectic origins are apparent: beyond the many words adapted from the Dutch, the Afrikaans word for corn, "mielie," comes from Portuguese; for ditch, "donga," from Zulu, and for fight, "baklei," from Malay.

Most students of the language agree that it was native Khoikhoi slaves and slaves from Malaya, India, other parts of the Dutch empire and other parts of Africa who first cobbled together a patois so they could communicate with their Dutch masters. Whites may have influenced the language but they did not create it alone, said Ikey van der Rheede, a professor of Afrikaans and dean of the faculty of arts at the University of the Western Cape.

"In the past the emphasis was on the Afrikaner playing a significant role," he said. "But one needs to re-evaluate that against the political background then. It would be folly to argue against the idea that your slaves played a major role in the transformation of your Dutch dialect to Afrikaans."

Mr. van der Rheede said that the most dynamic development of Afrikaans today is among the mixed-race populations, the 3.7 million people known here as coloreds, who are concentrated in the Western Cape area. The Afrikaans spoken among the mixed-race people has evolved into its own dialect and differs significantly from the standard Afrikaans spoken in Johannesburg and Pretoria, he said.

"One needs to look at apartheid as the reason for such a dialect," he said. "People were segregated and cloistered and so a dialect was born."

The mixed-race dialect has not only incorporated more English but also combined standard Afrikaans words creatively to create new meanings. "Saterdagaandkind" combines the words for Saturday night and child to refer to an illegitimate child. "Kieriegeld," for pension, combines the words for walking stick and money.

Lindsay Yarrow, 24, grew up near Cape Town speaking Afrikaans in school and English and Afrikaans at home. He said the Cape dialect he speaks includes words not known in the formal version. For example, when greeting a white customer in the store in which he works, Mr. Yarrow would probably use the traditional "goeie more," for good morning. But when he met up with his friends after work, he would say "Hoezit, my bra?" a borrowing from English meaning, "How is it, my brother?"

"It's more of a slang," Mr. Yarrow said.

Mr. Yarrow said he feels most comfortable speaking the dialect, and if asked to choose would pick the dialect first, English second and the standard Afrikaans last.

Many blacks do have a big problem with Afrikaans. To them it stood as one of apartheid's most visible symbols, and they despised the way it was forced down their throats. It was the compulsory use of Afrikaans in black schools that touched off the simmering tensions in Soweto in 1976 and led to the uprisings that shook South Africa.

"I can't stand it and I think it will be dead in 50 years," said Robert Monedi, a cab driver in Johannesburg. "I can't stand to hear it."

Mr. Monedi, whose native language is Setswana, said that when he was young his teachers tried to make him learn Afrikaans but he resisted. He said he has only needed the language with the police, who, under apartheid, would often stop him to check his pass book. Almost always, he said, they addressed him in Afrikaans; always, he answered in English. English, although also a language imposed by white colonizers, is not so resented.

"They would get very irritated," he said, "but I would say, 'English is the only language that I can speak to you so you understand.' "

Many Afrikaans speakers, white and mixed-race, fear that leaders in the African National Congress feel the same way as Mr. Monedi. As major, multinational corporations like Toyota consider dropping Afrikaans from their owner's manuals, as Parliament conducts business increasingly in English, as the South African Broadcasting Corporation struggles to acknowledge the nation's 11 new official languages and reduces the amount of Afrikaans heard on state-run television, Afrikaners worry that their language will wilt under the pressure of the perceived assault.

"You can't enforce a language by law, but you can wound a language by law," said Fritz Kok, managing director of the Afrikaans Taal en Kultuur Vereeniging (Afrikaans Language and Cultural Organization). "There's a danger that could happen here."

Mr. Marais, a member of the opposition National Party, is more blunt.

"I don't trust the A.N.C. with the Afrikaans language because of their hatred for Afrikaans," he said. "They will try to destroy everything of cultural value to the Afrikaner. Very soon Xhosa is going to be known as the language of the new oppressors."

Ironically, Afrikaners, who for 50 years elevated their language and culture at the expense of all others, now invoke multiculturalism when advocating Afrikaans. If South Africa is to grow and progress, every ethnic group must be allowed to flourish, they say.

The potential dominance in South Africa of English, which is making inroads in countries with far more entrenched and unified cultures, is a sensitive issue. Nearly half the South African population of 43 million speak and understand English. The nation's five Afrikaans universities have moved toward dual-language instruction to varying degrees. And even under apartheid, English was the language of business in the country.

"If Afrikaans is disempowered, it will also mean other languages will also remain secondary," said Christine Anthonissen, a lecturer in Afrikaans at the University of the Western Cape. "English will dominate."

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A version of this article appears in print on June 28, 1995, on Page A00006 of the National edition with the headline: To Preserve Afrikaners' Language, Mixed-Race South Africans Join Fray. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe